Vanessa Baker

Vanessa Baker works in the field of the environmental humanities and is interested in what literature reveals about the (un)sustainability of local ecologies during a period of intensive empire-building in East Asia. Her doctoral dissertation, “Entangled Ecologies of the Everyday: Gender, Labor, and Nature in Rural Proletarian Literature of Korea and Japan,” traces the co-evolution of laboring bodies with the land in the process of mineral extraction. This project places a critical focus on stories about the rural regions of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago where the material axis of empire was produced. The group of texts she refers to as “rural proletarian literature” locates the interrelations among gender, labor, and the material environment at the heart of the narrative; these entanglements generate a kinetic energy that propels the narrative forward. In the textual analysis, she surveys the wastelands generated in colonial-capital mining ventures, but also highlights the creative collaborations that cultivate spaces for the futurity of life. Her research interests include environmental history, feminist materialism, indigenous studies, political economy, new materialisms, and sound studies. Vanessa received her B.A. in East Asian Studies from Bard College, her M.A. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies with a Feminist Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine.